The Standard Model Higgs is just a necessary hysterical symptom of a correlationist view in which measurement makes things real. I like the line in the Guardian piece about an elephantiasis of mathematization.

The electric universe hypothesis sounds an awful lot like Bohm's implicate order, of which I've been a huge fan. Watch the videos.

Really, the computer as prosthetic device--not just for accomplishing tasks, but for storing information and sorting things. To help my brother Steve put these ten songs together. I am listening now. Remember Steve has schizophrenia? When you have that, even brushing your teeth is an Arctic expedition. So the fact that he put these pieces together is very meaningful for me.

The
book is divided into two parts: (1) What are hyperobjects? and (2) What do they
mean for humans?

The
introduction argues that hyperobjects have activated a philosophical
“earthquake” that compels us to refashion what we mean by a thing in the first
place (ontology).

In
five long sections, part (1) argues that hyperobjects have five properties.

Hyperobjects
are viscous: they stick to us and penetrate us, thus abolishing concepts of
distance and norms concerning meaning and propriety (metalanguage).

Hyperobjects
are nonlocal: they do not manifest at a specific time and place but rather are
stretched out in such a way as to challenge the idea that a thing must occupy a
specific place and time.

Hyperobjects
have a temporality so different from current human ones that they force us to
drop the idea of time as a neutral container. Instead, hyperobjects “emit” time
just like planets (Einstein).

Hyperobjects occupy
high dimensional phase spaces that are unavailable to direct human perception. Computational
prosthetics are required even to think them (mapping global warming requires
petaflops of computing speed, for instance).

Hyperobjects
exist “interobjectively,” which is to say that they consist, of, yet are not
reducible to, interactions between a large number of entities.

In
three long sections, part (2) argues that hyperobjects have three major
implications for humans:

“The end of the
world” as a meaningful horizon against which (human) events take shape has
already occurred.

Instead of
inhabiting a world, we find ourselves on the insides of a number of hyperobjects.
This fact reduces all human styles of engagement to forms of hypocrisy, thus
ending the reign of cynicism (otherwise known as modernity).

Culture has
entered an age of asymmetry in which
the nonhuman matches human cognition equally, but not in a neat Goldilocks way.
Rather, humans are sandwiched between two giant beings that increase one
another in a feedback loop: (human) reason and hyperobjects. Some contemporary art
is already showing signs of this paradox.

In the late
1700s, two things happened in the West. Humans began to deposit carbon in
Earth's crust, thus becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale and
giving rise to the geological period now called the Anthropocene. Secondly, philosophy
since Kant decided that it could not talk about reality as such, but only
(human) access to reality. I see these two events as related. With a strange
blindness, modernity plowed ahead with the actions now known to have changed geological
time.

Since then, it
has been creeping up on us that the end
of the world has already occurred. This isn't just a matter of atomic bombs
and global warming. It is also to do with the fact that concepts such as world and Nature (and even environment)
are human-scale concepts. Now that we can think things beyond the human scale
(climate, evolution, quanta, relativity…) we are no longer able to squeeze
ourselves into the narrow box of concepts such as world.

What has
appeared on our collective radar are entities that this book calls hyperobjects. These entities are so
large in both temporal and spatial terms that they defeat habitual ideas about
what a thing is in the first place. They ruthlessly underline the Kantian gap
between phenomenon and thing, since we can measure and compute them, and assess
their properties, yet we cannot directly point to them or sense them. Hyperobjects
change forever what counts as a thing. Things can no longer be thought as
“given” to a (human) subject, or as constantly present.

What has
happened since the end of the world is that humans have discovered that we live
inside a series of gigantic entities, the hyperobjects. This realization has deep
implications for how humans coexist with one another and with nonhumans. It
affects the realms of art, politics and ethics in a decisive way that cannot be
reversed.

It's like making a meal for a rather large number of people. Did I forget the toast points? I'm fixing the captions today and adding some acknowledgments to my excellent editors and to the very very kind reader, who revealed his name (you will find out). I also need to fix my author questionnaire and think about who will puff it. I say puff rather than blurb, because technically a blurb is actually the description of the book on the jacket. A puff is someone's salesmanship of it.

Happily Minnesota like actual discussion of images in captions. There is quite a lot to say and I can understand how with 23 pictures, many in color, someone might rifle through the book and look at the images. You want the captions to say something meaningful.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The masters say: “If you create an auspicious condition in your body and your environment, then meditation and realization will automatically arise.” Talk about posture is not esoteric pedantry; the whole point of assuming a correct posture is to create a more inspiring environment for meditation, for the awakening of Rigpa.

There is a connection between the posture of the body and the mind. Mind and body are interrelated, and meditation arises naturally once your posture and attitude are inspired.

I remember being on retreat in Crestone next door to some preppers who started talking quite "innocently" (at least innocently enough) to their lodger about how to shoot a bear. 30 minutes later it was what part of the black man's head to aim for when the looters come from the big city after civilization collapses...

I have a theory. Prepping is only consciously oriented to an apocalyptic future. In reality, it is an atavistic reaction to a world that has already ended (Anthropocene, hyperobjects--and let's not forget, America ceasing to be a frontier pioneer white settlers against everyone else in a circle). It's a reaction to an apocalypse that has already occurred.

Friday, December 21, 2012

I like to try to jump to a systems interpretation of such things as soon as I can. If only because when I mentioned that we were all in some sense responsible for Michael Jackson's death (top of the pops is a toxic place) the most conservative guy in my class snorted derisively.

Sam had a way of existing that was kind and helpful on a directly physical level. Many of the things that I learned from him were nonverbal, even when they included words. Sam had an ability not to be caught in the reactions of others. To walk with him through a crowd in Kathmandu, for instance, was to cut a steady and definite swathe through the buttery substance of that crowd. His body seemed to smile.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Oh yeah, sure I've done funerals. In Buddhism, and Vajrayana in particular, you get to do a lot of the ritual yourself, much more so than in Christianity. You are expected to. There is Sukhavati, and Amitabha practice in general. I was just doing one last week as it goes.

I've meditated with corpses and I've watched cremations where they burn the body in front of you. One of my best friends is a hospice chaplain (Buddhist but does all comers). So yeah.

"There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutedly destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other - even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation - must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic."
--Jacques Derrida

Wounded narcissism projects its (impossible) ideal of a completely closed loop, a magical lost narcissism, onto the other, then attacks it. This usually takes the form of hostility towards a perceived self-referential loop.

Wounded narcissism detects in the other a loop that it directly experiences as wounding, since its own loop is twisted (weird, from Norse urth, twist or turn, of fate).

Did I exempt myself from narcissism? Reality just is narcissistic wounds, down to the nonhuman, possibly even nonsentient levels. Since ego is just the precipitate of abandoned object cathexes (Freud) or, as yoga puts it, twists in the nadis (subtle channels) that are fixated on as "my" suffering--because of this, the form of an object as such just is the "wounds" it has sustained. An object is a wounded narcissism, a twisted loop. Reality is Jörmungandr, a serpent eating its tail (maybe the earliest example of a strange loop or Möbius strip).

So there is no us vs them on this level, no normal and pathological. Yet there is a syndrome in which wounded narcissism refuses to think itself as narcissism, a refusal to gather (comprehend) its suffering (patho-logos, the gleaning of suffering): "What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other." A refusal that in itself is the “pathology” of wounded narcissism, or rather, the pathologizing violence of wounded narcissism just is the refusal to see itself in its mirror. A refusal to be “narcissistic”...

Refusal to see: in this sense, a refusal to notice that one's tail is already in one's mouth. Exemption of oneself from being a strange loop. Exemption from language, refusal of “there is no metalanguage” (Lacan's distillation of phenomenology). The temptation of one-upsmanship, which is a serpent chasing its tail thinking “This way I shall outfox it!”

(Infernal Desiring Machine mix), by me a little while ago. It seemed appropriate somehow. Slightly mad acid.
It has a bit of Terminator saying “Come with me if you want to live...” Somehow I find that moment in T2 quite moving.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Just as Husserl claims, the logical content of thoughts is independent of thinking: here is a wonderful inverse proof of that. Jaron Lanier. Also, respect to his implicit dig at massively online crap. Thanks Dirk!

Every form has its own kind of content. (That's just basic art and literature analysis 101.)

No doubt, there is the good manners of "following the form," which I can't help subscribing to as an ex-Brit and as a Buddhist. But why is it good manners? It's not that the ritual one "just follows" is empty. It's that it has its own kind of content that is uplifting.

Otherwise I can just make up a ritual that includes shooting as many people as possible, and follow it without reason.

But sure yes, form, bring it on. Suits, under certain circumstances. The Californian neurosis is to be too suspicious of authority--with the ironic consequence of summoning the pepper spraying cops, overreaction.

Yet as I've said before, you need to know how to have generosity before you have discipline.

This latest shooting shows that adults with guns just can't be grownups about how they store and use them. From now on, only one handgun or rifle per owner and no automatics, semi-automatics or large clips. No people under 21 at a firing range, period. Gun store owners who refuse to do the proper checks to be prosecuted to the fullest extent.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

I'm speaking to the Justice League of America.
The U S of A,
Hey you,
Yes you in particular...
When it comes to the judgement day
And you're standing at the gates with your weaponry,
You dare go down on one knee,
Clasp your hands in prayer, start quoting me,
'Cos we say...

Our father we've managed to contain the epidemic in one place now,
Let's hope they shoot themselves instead of others, help to civilize the race now.
We've trapped the cause of the plague,
In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If we listen quietly we can hear them shooting from grave to grave.

You ought to
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

A gun is a tool. Tools withdraw from total access. Therefore they can do things that you don't want them to do.

A gun can go off without your conscious intention, killing your son (this happened quite recently in PA).

Your ideas about reality can force you to buy four guns, not one. (Did I mention that ideas are also tools that are withdrawn from access? Call them memes, call them intentional objects, whatever.)

Your psychopathic son can take these guns, kill you, and then go on a rampage. You did not consciously intend this.

Tools are withdrawn from total access. They can do things that surprise me. Therefore it would be best severely to limit the number of guns I can own, and their type. Assuming that is, that we decide that it is best if some people should have some access to guns at all.

Someone was wondering "how OOO helps" in the case of PA killing. This in part is a response to that question.

People kill people like the NRA says. Also, guns kill people, like the NRA doesn't say.

My brother Steve has schizophrenia. He used to live in a house with Patrick, who had schizophrenia and was also a psychopath. How do I know? Whenever I went around there he got in my face, like within two millimeters of my face, with a huge grin. And then he murdered his mum.

There was a particularly awesome moment during a weird Christmas party there when Steve told Patrick, "Not meaning to be rude or anything Patrick, but you're a c--- : in a strictly business quality sense." (Said in his usual quite quiet and not confrontational voice...)

So if the killer in CT had Asperger's, as some have been suggesting, he also was a psychopath. Asperger's is irrelevant, just as schizophrenia was irrelevant to Patrick's psychopathic behavior. You can have two conditions at once.

Friday, December 14, 2012

When I arrived here in the US, in 1992, I was stunned by the dehumanized ambience of gun violence reporting: "Shots rang out." Never "Someone fired a gun." And never ever "Someone tried to kill someone else dead."

They have a lot of guns in Canada. What makes them different in the killing statistics, to cite Michael Moore? It's a truism to say we live in a culture of aggression. But part of that is that we are strangely and situationally drained of affect when it comes to thinking death and violence, or mediating it.

I am reminded of the "embedded reporter" in Iraq in 2003, whose basic function was to act as a virtual couch potato inside your telly, so you would be distanced from and desensitized to the state killing. (The total opposite of the promised reality teevee, or rather, its truth.) "I hear the sound of tracer fire around me," said against a dark background while filmed with an infra red camera to give it a dissociated ambience.

It's the casualness of the violence isn't it? And the violence of the casualness. I remember my Buddhist friend Alan satirizing the way some hip hop lyrics worked: "I'm gonna kill you...I'm gonna kill you..."--but it was the tone with which he said it, the relaxed drawl, and in particular the smile, that made it specially American.

"Hello [representative x], my name is [y] and I'm calling because I vote. And I am calling because if you don't do something to control guns in this coming legislative session, I will personally do all I can to end your career."

My friend Leke Adeeko said an interesting thing about terrorist incidents in the USA back in 2002: "Well, now they know what it's like to be bombed." So Dirk just showed me this place where you can see the extent of bombing during the Blitz in London. I'm including a picture here of the bombs dropped in my area of London.

Just had an excellent lunch with my colleague Helena Michie to talk about the nineteenth-century dissertations happening at Rice. And last week I had about eight hours of talks with my existing Ph.D. students at UC Davis. All seem to be thriving in their different ways. I have students in Performance Studies, English and Comp. Lit. It's very very interesting and inspiring to work with them, and I feel like I'm at the best point in my career to be doing so--both in terms of what I can bring to the table by way of advice, and in terms of my relative lack of professional necessity: nothing is pushing me.

...by Juliet Brodie. HT Dirk. Smokers, energy transduction, acid/alkaline redox potential. Evolution is a tinkerer on the top of chemistry. With a view to biodiversity, “the twiglets on the tree of life.”

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Galloway and the commenters on the ever-popular Hegelian response site suspect that speculative realism is tantamount to dangerous financial speculation, in which entire worlds are wiped away and created at a stroke. Indeed, this does sound a bit like hyperchaos.

But what are the conditions of possibility for financial speculation as we've seen it recently? Conditions such as severe constraints on the explanatory power of sufficient reason, for instance? Or the anarchic "teeming" world that I describe in various places?

Isn't it just as likely that humans will need to pass through a cognitive (and social and philosophical) engagement with this negativity to reach "the other shore"--if there is one?

Galloway's is a stop the world, I want to get off position, common to (I repeat) a certain Romanticism within Marxism, a Romanticism that inheres in what McKenzie Wark today skillfully calls the "open" art form, the kind that big money pays big money for. The eschewal of the kitsch that is always the kitsch of the other.

The burden of proof is Galloway's--he is the one who must show why his eschewal of non-open form (found in his hostility to object-oriented programming, for instance, canard though it is) is not the reactionary one that gets hung on the walls of banks every week.

I prefer Ken's view of reality as an abundance and excess that high finance tames. So that the ultimate problem is that high finance is not excessive enough.

As Badiou remarks in his Continent interview, speculative realists are trying to work on new forms of negation adequate to the present times. The old forms are evidently not working.

Galloway's cry for totality is the rusty squeak of an old farm gate, misheard as Nature through the rose-tinted hearing aid of the contemporary Romantic consumer: "They don't make em like they used to..."

Ken Wark with an excellent post. Couldn't agree more with it. It's quite quite nice how a stealth paganism flourishes at Christmas. Stealth at least here in the USA. Maybe not so stealth elsewhere.

The art of withdrawing the hand that gives and leaving just the gift as given."

This could have come from my Continent essay. (See previous.)

Then there's this:
"It is not the fault of artists that they are now obliged to make work for one of history’s more useless and clueless ruling classes. Theirs is a bespoke business, dependent on patrons. But one might at least take on the task of even more closely making the art portray its real subject. Contemporary art gets by on alibis. As if it could gesture to a politics of the aesthetic or the aesthetics of politics, as if it could redistribute the sensible independent of any redistribution of the tangible. All of this is just dishonesty. Art is a portrait of its patrons, and nothing else. The old Dutch masters at least knew who their clients really were and what they wanted."

"[Art] naively thinks it makes ‘open’ works, exempt from any particular meaning. As such it is just the spitting image of a ruling class without qualities."

It's what I was saying about high (conceptual) art versus kitsch (here). And Christmas is an incredible example of it:

"The hard path for art would be to abolish itself in favor of Xmas. Instead of making ‘works,’ the work of finding the tangible excess of the world, of making again the ritual of presenting the thing that is usually withdrawn, and withdrawing the human who is usually all too present, so that the world presents itself to the human and the human to the world, so that the human knows what it has been given and what it has keep and give again. To find again the long loop of imperfect presence in the world which gives itself back to the world, which both learns and teaches the power of the double act."

My "Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones" is in this along with an essay on Meillassoux by Graham, a piece by Michael O'Rourke, and an interview with Badiou, that bourgeois user of the dreaded "mathematics."

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

...my first meditation instructor, Roland, was once a very gifted sarangi player who had worked with Ravi Shankar. Perhaps Ravi Shankar's music was the first time I had heard a sitar, somewhere around the age of five-ish. I was entranced by the timbre: the elicitation of thousands of harmonics from wire and wood, the phasing of the notes against the sympathetic strings. Indian music isn't necessarily as narrative based as Western music, though stories are told. It's often more about timbre, which means that it's about how things attune (and detune) to (and from) one another.

Ravi Shankar got me thinking about materiality, the depth of a thing.

Once or twice I have played a sitar, very very badly. It's a very difficult instrument.

I liked how Ravi Shankar worked with Harrison on the Concert for Bangladesh and I liked how he worked in A Concert for George.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci